Racing in parallel: Quantum versus Classical

In a fair comparison of the performance of a quantum algorithm to a classical one it is important to treat them on equal footing, both regarding resource usage and parallelism. We show how one may otherwise mistakenly attribute speedup due to parallelism as quantum speedup. We apply such an analysis both to analog quantum devices (quantum annealers) and gate model algorithms and give several examples where a careful analysis of parallelism makes a significant difference in the comparison between classical and quantum algorithms.